The need for higher capability, weight efficient, and long lasting extreme environment thermal protection has necessitated the use of higher capability advanced extreme environment materials incorporating ceramic fibers. Ceramic fibers provide fabrics or textiles which have high tensile strength, high modulus of elasticity and the ability to maintain these properties at elevated temperatures. A property of ceramic fibers, however, is their somewhat brittle nature, that is, the tendency of the fibers to fracture under acute angle bends (e.g., as are present when sewing machine needles are used and/or complex geometric shapes are knit). When machine sewing thread made of ceramic fibers and twisted in the conventional manner is subjected to small radius stress, such as encountered in the sewing needle of machines or in the formation of components of complex geometries, the ceramic fiber sewing thread twisted in the conventional manner is prone to breakage. Due to this problem, tedious and labor intensive hand sewing techniques have been employed to fabricate articles made from ceramic fiber fabrics or cloths that often need to be sewn or tied with other components to increase mechanical and thermal properties tailored for specific applications.
Furthermore, these known labor intensive techniques typically have a low ability to form complex geometries, leading to wrinkling, deformations, and subsequently to degraded performance in these fiber-based products. Beyond the fabrication challenges, products produced using current techniques routinely suffer from qualification test failures, part-to-part variance and are susceptible to damage during operation as well as during routine maintenance, which in turn leads to increased cost to repair and replace.
Therefore there is a need for improved light-weight, low cost and higher temperature capable components incorporating ceramic fibers and methods of manufacturing the same.